The Canaries in Our Coal Mine

By Audrey Stallsmith

I agree with my pastor that too many people these days are more concerned about animal babies than human ones. But I disagree with his contention that those of us who worry about the environment are idolizing the creation rather than worshipping the Creator.

Granted, some Wiccans do seem to worship nature, as I detailed in my earlier article—“New Age or Old Evil?”—on what is or isn’t witchcraft. But many of us just are trying to preserve what God made.

After all, if I were an artist who had entrusted my creations to my loved ones’ keeping, I would expect them to make every effort to keep the works of my hands safe. And I would become very angry if their neglect allowed those creations to be destroyed. I also would suspect that those loved ones didn’t care much about me after all if they didn’t care about the things I had made.

I suspect it is the idolization of money, not the idolization of nature, that is causing so many of our current problems. Any cutting of environmental corners that can help save bucks or jobs often is deemed a good thing by businessmen and politicians, even though we have seen over and over again what the cutting of corners in construction causes. Collapse. So our young people have good reason to worry that we are handing over to them a damaged ecosystem.

I don’t doubt the environment is changing because I’ve seen that happen in my lifetime. Not only do the last spring frosts come earlier than they used to, there are far fewer bugs and amphibians around than there were when I was a child.    

Unfortunately, they aren’t as pretty as the bluebirds and Monarch butterflies that everybody has been chipping in to help save. A decline in the so-called “bad” bugs could even seem to be a good thing, but it upsets the balance of nature. Without those bad bugs, after all, what are the “good” bugs—not to mention the bug-eating birds—going to eat? Although Rachel Carson spared us a Silent Spring after her book helped get DDT banned, now our summers are becoming ominously quieter with the decline in grasshopper and cricket populations.       

And we’ve all heard what the decline in pollinators could do to our food supply. That should be a warning to us. When the little things begin to suffer, the larger ones can’t be far behind. 

Miners used to take canaries into coal mines because those smaller creatures would succumb to bad air first, giving the miners time to escape. But they had to be willing to acknowledge that something was wrong, rather than arguing that canaries die all the time anyway! 

Some Christians think we blithely can ignore climate change because “God will take care of us.” My pastor seems to believe that the verse which promises "While the earth remaineth, seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease" guarantees that God will fix everything just to keep the world going. 

But God is a good Father and a good father doesn’t keep fixing his children’s problems for them. Eventually He has to let those kids live with the consequences of their mistakes, because that is the only way they ever will learn. Genesis 8:22 doesn't guarantee the harvests will be good ones or that the cold and heat won't become more extreme. If we don’t wise up soon, we all could be living in a much poorer and more disaster prone world.